The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  But now it was a world of dark, not light. The Shag was a dangerous place to be, even on this rather placid night. Ben and I watched the lights of the boat skirt around the rest of the tiny island and move off to check the Singing Ladies.

  “Just for the record, I can swim,” Ben said.

  “I think I believe you. Anyway, I’m glad I’m not here alone.”

  With flashlights on, we groped our way to a somewhat higher, dry ledge. “Turn off your light,” Ben said. “Just sit here for a minute. Let’s let our eyes adjust. There’s probably enough reflection off the water to allow us better walking if we don’t use the lights.”

  He was right. I could sense the pupils of my eyes dilate until they were willing to allow for vision just by sucking in all of this cold empty moonlight, starlight and sealight. There was even a faint phosphorescent glow of the sea. And again the surreal quality of this place seemed so gripping that I wondered if anything was ever real. Could any of this be connected to the real world of the mainland or even Whalebone Island? In the distance, I could see the headlights of Lambert’s boat and further to the north I could see scattered lights of houses and the odd street light or two strung out like a haphazard carnival in the dark beyond.

  “It’s ironic, isn’t it?” Ben said, not quite ready to stand up, find his island legs and begin the search. “Delaney, I mean. It reminds me of being a doctor. Cure a man of one ill only to set him up for the next one. Fix up a kid with a knife wound only to make sure he’s in good health to be gunned down by a neighbour. Rescue someone from the streets of hell and drop him on the beaches of paradise only to… well, the story’s not over yet.” But I had a feeling we were not to find a city man like Delaney pulled to sea in a tiny boat, happy and healthy.

  “Let’s stay together,” I said. “Follow me.”

  I led Ben along the ridge of the loose rock. Gulls awoke and took to the night skies with awful, terrifying banshee shrieks. I took careful steps and advised Ben at every toehold of loose stone or jagged rock. On the lee side of the island I found an oar and carried it with me.

  “It looks like one that might have been with the dory, but it’s hard to tell.”

  There was nothing else on the perimeter, nothing save gulls, each one a nightmare of white wing and flapping air as it launched itself into the darkness. Dozens were in the air now, a swirling maelstrom of angry wings and beaks. I trusted a gull, though, not to attack a thing it did not understand and clearly these gulls would not understand our presence nor trust our intentions. They’d know it was best to stay out of harm’s way. I used the oar as a walking stick as we stumbled around the moonscape toward the pool at the centre of the island. And then I saw him. The half-moon was high now and allowed enough light to see with great cold clarity. I saw the body of a man face down in the centre of the pool where my father and I had once discovered pure freedom.

  As we scuttled down to the water line and the scree shifted and slid beneath us, I felt again how unsure my footing was in the world of the living. At every turn I felt my good intentions would be swallowed up, digested by some great haphazardous, incomprehensible scheme. It was a vast, impersonal network of events that insisted there was no purpose, no action worth attempting that would not be undone by the permeating, nauseating madness that directed life.

  Ben took the oar from me as I stood mute and helpless on the shore line and he jumped out onto a rock outcropping in the pool, then carefully, delicately, pulled the body to the shore. I helped my friend, my accomplice in this unintended murder; I helped him lift the bloated, cold and sea-ravaged remains of what was once a man to the shore. As we rolled him over on his back, some stupid impulse made me shine my flashlight in his face — a horrible, empty portrait of what was once old Duke. His cheeks were bruised and scraped and something had been biting on his neck. And then I stepped back, tripping, nearly falling into the water as I saw the mouth appear to move. I half-expected the dead man to talk which might have been less gruesome than the sight of the small, blue-green crab that emerged from the mouth, still tugging with one claw at the tongue it was trying to steal from the victim.

  Ben kicked at the crab and sent it catapulting through the air into the water. I switched off my light and breathed the salt air of this sad, cold night into my lungs, thinking of Gwen, and wishing I had not been born. He rolled Duke back on his stomach and tried to empty him of the enormous weight of the sea he had swallowed. A drowning man, he explained, can swallow almost half his weight. “We’ll never be able to carry him like this.” It was a slow, difficult job accompanied by ghastly sounds made as the water was released and given back to the sea.

  As we saw the boat lights approach, we staggered and lurched, our poor dead brother in tow as we made our way back to the boot. Ben and I never again said anything to each other about how we had inadvertently led old Duke to his death by falsifying his life, turning him into a grandfather and a fisherman, a man who understood boats. I was sure that what we had done was to bring more pain and suffering into the lives of Gwen’s family.

  The next day I awoke to the sound of someone knocking at my door. I got up and threw on an old pair of pants and walked shirtless through the cold house. It was Gwen. She had her books with her. I could read nothing from her face, though.

  “I’m not going to school,” I said. “Not today. I’m so sorry about your grandfather.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  Gwen walked in and closed the door behind her. She let out a sigh. Her face looked pale. I knew she had been crying. So much had happened in such a short time. Was it possible that we had been punished somehow for our decision to go to Boston, to end the pregnancy? She sat down at the kitchen table. I saw the bedroom door to my parents room open a crack. My mother looked out but then closed it again, left us alone. I sat down at the table across from Gwen. She leaned across, cupped my face with her two warm, beautiful hands. “Don’t look so sad,” she said.

  Out of her math textbook she pulled a folded square of paper. “Read this,” she said. “It’s a poem he wrote yesterday. He’s been writing poems ever since he got here.” And so I read the second work of the man from the streets of New York. The words were printed in a neat, stylized handwriting:

  The shrunken man, indifferent, nameless, faceless in despair

  finds new strength in strangers turned towards heaven.

  Yet reaching back to earth with arms

  that lift the roof of hell

  they find me floating up into the sky of blue,

  the sun a net of warm love on my pain

  until I find I have surpassed the one I was

  and settle in to sleep the sleep of seas and sons

  and sheets as soft as floating air.

  “I think I understand this,” I said. “I’m sure I do. Your grandfather was quite a guy. He was very deep.”

  Gwen shook her head. “He wasn’t my grandfather.”

  “Of course he was.”

  Gwen knew the truth, though. “My mother believed he was my grandfather. I believed it until last night when I found this and his other writings. I guess my father knew for quite a while.”

  “It’s hard for me to explain,” I said.

  “It’s okay. I read all his stuff.” She pulled out a notebook from her pile of books. “It’s all in here. Some poetry, some other things. It all fits together. I think you gave me a very precious gift. I don’t think Duke Delaney would have regretted any of it. He drowned at sea and it wasn’t your fault. That part was an accident. Duke had believed that part of him was my grandfather. He was fitting the puzzle together of his unlived life from what my mother told him. He believed he understood boats. Funny how well he had become the best of what my grandfather actually was.”

  “How’s your mother?”

  “Not good. But I think she’s still better than if he had never come into our lives. My father and I have decided not to tell her the truth. I don’t like the feeling of it, but I guess that maybe there is something
to the notion of a good lie.”

  I hung my head, thinking about all my attempts at the necessary lies, the good lies.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “I’m glad we went to Boston. I feel terrible about the drowning. But I don’t want to hang around home today.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to be with you.”

  I looked at the pile of books. “Are we going to go to school,” I asked, thinking of all that had happened, “and pre-tend that nothing has happened?”

  “No,” she said. “I think you just changed my mind. Let’s forget about school today. I want to spend as much time with you as I can right now. I think I’m still trying to figure out who you really are.”

  35

  My father stayed for a few days until he felt that there was just too much pressing business in Halifax awaiting him. He tried again to convince my mother to bring us to the city with him where, he assured us, we would all be very happy. But I’m sure he knew it was a lost cause. My mother would have none of it. And neither would Casey or I.

  I don’t think they ever talked about Ben. And as I watched my old man’s Buick spit gravel from its tires as he left us once again, I wondered if there could really be anything wrong with my mother’s relationship with Ben. What did I under-stand of adults? Not much. My mother would always be a mystery to me, but so would my father. How could he leave us here like this, anyway? What could possibly be so important that it would take him away from the island, away from this family? Maybe it was right then that my mother had this other “lover.” After all, my father was deeply smitten with politics. Maybe there are irreconcilable powers that pull things apart, push others together.

  It was like Tennessee Ernie’s lecture to me about the forces of the universe, the “news” he received daily on his backyard dish-like antenna. Galaxies colliding, suns blinking out, black holes sucking everything into an intense overwrought gravity pit of nothingness, the entire universe pushing outward, everything driving away from the centre of its creation, then at some point flagging, slowing down and reversing, drawing itself back together.

  As my father drove to Halifax, I went to visit Ben again. The first floor of his house was framed in now. There was no sheathing on the walls but the two-by-six studs made for wonderful walls of air. He was sitting in the middle of the subfloor, now solid, now nailed down, and watching a sparrow that had alighted on the lintel where a window would be.

  “Someday there will even be a roof,” he told me.

  “And then what?” I asked.

  “Then I’ll move in,” he said.

  “But you’ll still be alone,” I said. “This is a house big enough for, well, a family.”

  He ignored my point. “As I build, I’m using my mind to put a kind of personal life force into the walls. Nothing you could see or even detect, but I believe that as a person builds, he puts more into a thing than just the physical elements. Cutting wood, piecing it together, it’s only logical that you transfer some of your own energy, some of your own spirit into a thing until it becomes well, sort of, alive.”

  “I believe that,” I said, because I knew what construction was like. I knew that there was always a return above and beyond the mere physical creation of anything.

  “A metaphysical dividend,” Ben said.

  “Something like that. But you, Doc, you need more than just a house. You need to find someone to share this with.” My voice had finally formulated what had been in my thoughts. I wanted to see Ben with a woman, a woman other than my mother. Perhaps if he could find himself a lover or a wife, his alliance with my mother would ease off and maybe, just maybe, that would help bring my mother and father back closer together. Maybe it would cause my old man to give up on his Halifax mistress — Tory politics.

  Ben looked down at a galvanized ten penny nail in his hand. “There have been women, kid, believe me. Very sophisticated women. New York ladies. With money, with education, with heels this high.” He held the nail between his two palms up to the sunlight. “But it never worked out.” He pressed the nail between his hands until the tip began to drive into the soft flesh. “They had a bad habit of doing nasty things to me.” The tip of the nail now broke the skin. I saw blood. I snatched the nail away from him. “They had a way of using me up, Ian, until I felt like someone had hollowed me out with nothing left inside but pain and hurt.” He rubbed at the spot of blood in his palm. “No, I’m happier here. Like this.”

  I walked around the perimeter of the house and put my hand on the corner posts, ran it along the smooth window sills and the diagonal supports. The wood smelled fresh, new. It was still a bit green, recently cut spruce from Gaetz Mill at the Head of Chezzetcook. Felled, cut, planed in a matter of weeks. It would crack and dry and twist a little as it gave up its moisture, but this would be a strong building. I could feel the energy field in the structure, the metaphysical dividend.

  “This is going to be a great house,” I said.

  “Your mother likes it, too,” he said, but then realized the subtext of what he was saying. “She says that this exact spot was once the summer camp ground for migrating Micmacs. She says I will have many uninvited guests in my living room and that I should learn the language if I want to understand them.”

  “Sounds scary.”

  “She says the only thing that will keep the dead Indians away is television.”

  “Are you going to get a television?”

  “Only if it gets too crowded,” he said. Then he sighed, and got up to go sit on the saw horse. “Tell your father there’s nothing to worry about. I’m not that kind of a man. I don’t want to cause any trouble. But Dorothy and I are good friends.”

  As I walked on towards Hants Buckler’s, I wasn’t sure I was convinced. Love, for me, was still a tumultuous, out-of-control emotion. I wanted to be with Gwen all the time, every minute, and that did not seem possible.

  After things settled down, after the death of old Duke, Gwen spent less time with me and more at home in front of her television. She had become addicted to watching TV news reports about the war. When we were together, she told me body counts, details of massacres, tonnage of bombing raids, daily costs of the war in terms of money and casualties.

  “I guess we didn’t stop it, did we?” I meant Boston.

  “No,” she said. “But we will. They’ve been marching in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, at the Pentagon, even in Ottawa. I think we’re on the verge of a full scale revolution.”

  Again I heard the echo of my father from years ago. Revolution. How peaceful and wonderfully unproductive life was on Whalebone Island. Why couldn’t the world stay away and let us be? Too bad my father hadn’t successfully blown up the bridge and figured a way to move us further to sea, away from the coast. Maybe Gwen’s old man had a theory about how this could actually happen. Certainly a man with a brain capable of developing a thermonuclear device could figure out a way for us to overcome limits of geography.

  “Hants Buckler found a bale of marijuana,” I told Gwen, wanting to change the subject from politics to the story of the old guy’s latest gift from the sea.

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No. Just washed in yesterday. He knows what it is but doesn’t quite know what to do with it. I think he’s been feeding it to his chickens.”

  Suddenly a devilish grin came over Gwen’s face. “I think we should go over and give him some suggestions.”

  The door to Hants’ house was open, but he didn’t seem to be anywhere around. I heard an axe blade biting into wood from his nearby woodlot and figured he was out there cutting down black spruce for firewood. Chickens were running around chasing each other in crazy patterns in the dirt. A couple were pecking away at the bale of what looked like dried timothy. Gwen shooed the chickens away and we sat down on what was left of the burlap covered bale of marijuana. She picked some off with her fingers and put some in my mouth. “Chew it.”

  I chewed.
I think I was expecting to hallucinate immediately. She sucked on a stem herself and split some seeds with her teeth. I spit out the stalks and kissed Gwen long and hard on the mouth. For once I had driven the devils of the war out of her. She was mine again. I had suddenly turned into a big fan of marijuana. Hants walked towards us out of the stunted forest and found us like that, kissing. He set his axe down by the wall of his shed, wiped his forehead with what looked like the remains of a very old sock. “You found the dope,” he said calmly, tugging at what was left of his ear lobe.

  “Quite a bit here,” I said.

  “Chickens like it for the seeds. I’m not at all sure what it’ll do to their laying habits. You kids don’t know nothing about this sort of thing, do you?”

  “Smoked any of it yet?” Gwen asked. “That’s what people do with it, you know. They smoke it.”

  “Like tobacco?” Hants asked.

  “Sort of,” Gwen answered.

  “Makes you go funny in the head?”

  “Some people like it.”

  Hants scratched on his stubbled jaw. “Think I’d get in any trouble if the law found it here?”

  “If they thought it was yours, they might send you to jail. They’d think you were a dealer,” I told him.

  Hants looked unmoved. I don’t think he believed that the law of the land, the Mounties, had any jurisdiction whatsoever over him. “Only one of two things to do, then,” he said. “Either bury the stuff or use it up.”

  “Smoke it, you mean?” Gwen asked, looking down at what must have certainly been at least a hundred pounds of densely packed pot leaves.

  “I got some rolling papers in the house. Let’s see how much of it we can get smoked. I need a break anyway. If we can’t get too far into it, I’ll just spread it around for the chickens and hope it doesn’t stop ‘em from laying eggs.”

  We tried to keep up a conversation about tides and wind conditions and Hants attempted to explain how life was different when he was growing up, how the sea was a different colour, the sky a different hue, how it was a time when something meant something, but mostly we fell to coughing and giggling. The chickens were hysterical to watch and the sea sparkled like blue-white diamonds and, after a bit, Hants went inside and brought out an old warped fiddle and proceeded to play an out-of-tune version of “Farewell to Nova Scotia.” He said that the song always reminded him of a woman he met years ago.